I've made a rather embarrassing mistake; Katana is quite correct, and this World should be called "The Writers Bloc" without the apostrophe at the end.
Written as The Writers' Bloc with the apostrophe, the meaning is that this is some sort of group that belongs to a group of writers. Written as The Writers Bloc without the apostrophe, the word "writers" is now more correctly modifying/describing the "bloc" itself: a bloc of writers as opposed to the block of the writers.
As such, I've changed how I write the World and shall bug Red again when she gets back home from Toronto to edit the banner at the top of the introduction. Indeed, when Desbreko originally suggested the name spelling as it is ("Bloc" without the "k" at the end), he wrote the full title, "Writers Bloc", without the apostrophe. At the time I just thought he was being lazy, but evidently he may have been paying more attention that I had been. Heh... how a work of writing can change after a night's sleep, y'know?
I spent the better part of my free time this morning thinking about this. If anyone reads the comments in the previous post, you'll see I was initially doing a stubborn thing where I wasn't going to change the title to something better. It would more or less eviscerate my entire bit about apostrophe marks with which I used to frame my preface... and seriously, as a first post for a World dedicated to proper writing techniques and methods, that was brutal.
As the morning went on I came to realise something: if I'm to expect people to come here, open to criticism and suggestions, I need to be open to it as well. So here I am, about ten minutes after getting home in the early afternoon writing this addendum.
I may have created this World and I may edit the Fan Words section, but I'm far from perfect. I'm fallible and mortal just like everyone else here, and I've never pretended to be anything else. So yes, Katana, thank you for catching that for me.
This is pretty much the heart of what it means to be a beta-reader, though. Again, asking for one has nothing to do with your own personal writing ability; it's just a means for getting a fresh new pair of eyes to look at your work - something you may have written late at night when you're maybe not quite as attentive as you thought you were - and to catch all the bits that got past you the first (and second) time around.
So yeah. I funked up and I'm kind of embarrassed about that, but at the same time I'm glad this has turned into an excellent example of all that is good about this whole new project.
So we're called "The Writers Bloc" without the apostrophe now. Cool? Cool.
